Millions of plastic garment hangers are removed from clothing each day at point-of-sale in retail stores. These hangers must be dealt with in the back rooms of the stores through a process of untangling, sorting by style and organizing them for re-use. This is a serious problem because of labor intensiveness, cost of broken hangers ($0.25 to $1.00 each) due to tangle, storage space and retail efficiency. In addition, new federal and state regulations against discarding plastic hangers into the nation's landfills, makes recycling for all retail stores a necessity.
Successful hanger management is thwarted by the multiplicity of hanger styles used in retail stores. Previous attempts to sort and organize all hangers have failed because no one hanger management system will accept and sort all hangers.
At present, to sort hangers, boxes of various materials and sizes are used at point of sale. Hangers removed by sales clerks are thrown into these boxes. When full, the boxes of hangers are removed to the back of the retail establishment, the hangers manually untangled and sorted for re-use. This method is the most frequently used system and the most costly from the standpoint of labor costs, efficiency and broken hanger expense.
One system attempting to deal with this problem includes a hair-pin fixture sorting method using a metal fixture consisting of two metal hoops, one shorter than the other. The hanger hook is placed in the tallest hoop and hanger arms are placed between the two hoops. This method makes no attempt to align hooks or separate hooks by style. This system is only slightly superior to the box sorting method because of tangling of hangers, broken hangers still exist and re-sorting is still necessary.
Another system includes a bar sorting assembly having three to six bars approximately 24 inches long. Each bar is designated for a specific hanger type and sortation results to some degree, dependent completely on employee discipline. In operation, serious problems develop if foam rubber hold downs unlock in which case all hangers can fall off the bars during transfer from a bar rack at a point of sale to a rolling rack for transfer to a back room. Bars must be held horizontal and hangers tend to swing out of alignment and frustrate easy loading on rolling racks. This system is the most expensive hanger management system mainly because it has a very elaborate racking system required to hold hangers and its many plastic pieces and foam rubber parts that require replacement.
It has been determined that the critical distance for a hanger is the center of the hanger hook to the shoulders or arms of the hanger. Since this distance varies by style, retail chain dedicated hangers and manufacturer, a number of hanger fixtures are required and designed to accept each particular hanger type. This clearly is unacceptable, costly, confusing and unworkable because of space requirements.
Hanger standardization then would seem to be the only real solution; however, this solution would have to be accepted industry-wide. This apparently will not happen in view of the large investment in the present inventory of retail hangers which would have to be scrapped and replaced with new standardized hangers at a substantial cost. Since the problem remains, the problem to be solved must be how to bring order and efficiency to the tangle and confusion of the costly hanger management problem.